The ability of electronic equipment to survive and to be usable in severe environmental conditions is an attribute which has been recognized for many applications. Such severe environmental conditions include rain, desert heat, dust or noisy electromagnetic conditions. Other types of severe environmental conditions include mechanical vibrations generated by moving vehicles or intentionally induced, extreme electromagnetic interference.
Known housings or cases usually are intended to be rigid and mechanically resistant to deformation. The rigidity of the case is used to protect an internal instrument.
Beyond a need to protect the equipment from the environmental conditions, there is a need to be able to provide electrical signals to and to obtain or read electrical signals from the equipment. The subject electrical signals may well be provided by other adjacent equipment or transmitted to such adjacent equipment. Hence, it has also been recognized that merely protecting the equipment is often sufficient only for shipping purposes.
To use the equipment while at the same time continuing to protect it from the severe environmental conditions requires that it be possible to couple connectors to the equipment, though enclosed in protective packaging, reconfigure, replace, update or provide maintenance to the equipment. Further, one piece of electrical equipment is often advantageously located adjacent to another, different, piece of electrical equipment. Hence, it would be desirable to be able to stack or interchange packaged equipment.
Known protective systems require external cables to interconnect instruments. Such cables can, unfortunately, be lost or misplaced at times.
Thus, there continues to be a need for packaging which enables electronic equipment to survive in severe environmental conditions. Preferably such packaging will be user-friendly from the point of view of configuring packaged equipment for operation and subsequently using the equipment not withstanding the severe environmental conditions. Finally, it would be preferable if the packaging exhibited a standardized, modular, stackable aspect ratio to facilitate transportability.